VI
The new realism was short lived. Even while its propaganda like Crumbling Idols and The Responsibilities of the Novelist were spreading the news that Walter Scott was dead and that the god of things as they are had come in his power, a new romantic period already had begun. Maurice Thompson, one of the most clear-eyed critics of the period, wrote in May, 1900:
Just how deep and powerful the present distinct movement toward a romantic revival may be no one can tell. Many facts, however, point to a veering of popular interest from the fiction of character analysis and social problems to the historical novel and the romance of heroic adventure. We have had a period of intense, not to say morbid, introversion directed mainly upon diseases of the social, domestic, political, and religious life of the world. It may be that, like all other currents of interest when turned upon insoluble problems, this rush of inquiry, this strain of exploitation, has about run its course.... Great commercial interest seems to be turned or turning from the world of commonplace life and the story of the analysis of crime and filth to the historical romance, the story of heroism, and the tale of adventure. People seem to be interested as never before in the interpretation of history. It may be that signs in the air of great world changes have set all minds more or less to feeling out for precedents and examples by which to measure the future's probabilities.[158]
The causes of this later wave of romanticism, a wave that was wider than America, have been variously estimated. Harold Frederic suggested Blackmore as the possible fountain head. "Was it Lorna Doone, I wonder, that changed the drift in historical fiction? The book, after it was once introduced to public attention by that comic accident which no one can blame Mr. Blackmore for grinding his teeth over, achieved, as it deserved, one of the great successes of our time—and great successes set men thinking."[159] Paul Leicester Ford, himself an historian and a notable producer of historical romance, was inclined to another explanation: "At the present moment [1897] there seems a revival of interest in American history, and the novelist has been quickly responsive to it."[160] The English critic E. A. Bennett offered still another solution: "America is a land of crazes. In other words, it is simple: no derision is implied.... And America is also a land of sentimentalism. It is this deep-seated quality which, perhaps, accounts for the vogue of history in American fiction. The themes of the historical novel are so remote, ideas about them exist so nebulously in the mind, that a writer may safely use the most bare-faced distortions to pamper the fancy without offending that natural and racial shrewdness which would bestir itself if a means of verification were at hand. The extraordinary notion still obtains that human nature was different 'in those days'; that the good old times were, somehow, 'pretty,' and governed by fates poetically just."[161]
Ford undoubtedly was right in assigning the immediate outburst at the close of the century to a new interest in American history. The war with Spain brought about a burst of patriotism and of martial feeling that made the swashbuckling romance and the episode from the American Revolution seem peculiarly appropriate. But the war was by no means the only cause. The reaction had come earlier, a reaction from the excess of reality that had come with the eighties. The influence of Stevenson must not be overlooked, Stevenson who, type of his age, had sickened early of the realistic, the analytic, the problematic.
"I do desire a book of adventure," Stevenson had written to Henley as early as 1884, "a romance—and no man will get or write me one. Dumas I have read and re-read too often; Scott, too, and I am short. I want to hear swords clash. I want a book to begin in a good way; a book, I guess, like Treasure Island.... Oh, my sighings after romance, or even Skeltery, and O! the weary age which will produce me neither!
"'Chapter I
"'The night was damp and cloudy, the ways foul. The single horseman, cloaked and booted, who pursued his way across Willesden Common, had not met a traveler, when the sound of wheels....'
"'Chapter II
"'"Yes, sir," said the old pilot, "she must have dropped into the bay a little afore dawn. A queer craft she looks."
"'"She shows no colors," returned the young gentleman, musingly.
"'"They're a-lowering of a quarter-boat, Mr. Mark," resumed the old salt. "We shall soon know more of her."
"'"Aye," replied the young gentleman called Mark, "and here, Mr. Seadrift, comes your sweet daughter Nancy tripping down the cliff."
"'"God bless her kind heart, sir," ejaculated old Seadrift.'"
Be the cause what it may, for a time historical romance was the dominant literary form in America. In 1902, Bliss Perry, editor of the Atlantic, could write of "the present passion for historical novels." To what extent they were a passion may be learned from the records of publishers. By the summer of 1901, Ford's Janice Meredith had sold 275,000 copies, Mary Johnston's To Have and to Hold, 285,000, and Churchill's The Crisis, 320,000, and his Richard Carvel, 420,000.[162] One might give equally large figures for such favorites as Charles Major's When Knighthood Was in Flower, Tarkington's Monsieur Beaucaire, Mitchell's Hugh Wynne, Free Quaker, Thompson's Alice of Old Vincennes, and very many others, foreign as well as American.
The novels fall into two classes: those in which the historical element is made emphatic and those which are pure romances. Of the former class Paul Leicester Ford's Janice Meredith is, perhaps, the best type; of the latter, Mitchell's Hugh Wynne. Ford was first of all a historian, a bibliographer, a tireless delver among historical sources. He had been educated in his father's library, which contained the finest collection of Americana in the world, and at twelve we find him publishing on his own press a genealogy of Webster of his own compilation. His later bibliographical and historical work centered about the American Revolution. When he turned to fiction it was as a historian, a specialist who would exploit real historical characters and real areas of American life. The Honorable Peter Stirling was a study of ward politics with the young Grover Cleveland as the central figure. It was an accurate picture, vigorous and truthful, and even though a fiction it is a valuable historical document. So it was with Janice Meredith, a historian's day-dream over his Americana. It presents an accurate picture of the social conditions of its time. Many of its characters are revolutionary leaders: Washington is a central figure—"The true George Washington," presented with all his failings as well as with all his excellences.
It was natural that Ford should make much of the material that he knew so thoroughly: he brought it in sometimes for its own sake rather than for the sake of the story. Undoubtedly he falsified history by making his real personages, like Washington and Franklin, take part in conversations that never occurred and do things that strictly never were done, but it is equally true that he has given us the best conception that is now possible of how it must have felt to live in the days of the Revolution. His chief excellences were his vigor and vivacity, and his Norris-like mastery of details. He was a realist enamoured of truth who extended his realism into the domain of romance. His faults all centered about his undoubted deficiency in literary art: he lacked constructive power and distinction of style. His stories are the diversions of a professional historian, brilliant but without promise of permanence.
Typical of the second variety of historical romance is the work of Silas Weir Mitchell, poet, romancer, artist, and historian. Dr. Mitchell was of Philadelphia as Dr. Holmes was of Boston, and like Dr. Holmes he gave his most vigorous years completely to his profession. He was fifty-three and one of the leading world specialists on nervous diseases when he wrote his first full novel, In War Time. His own explanation, given in later years to a gathering of University of Pennsylvania men, has often been quoted:
When success in my profession gave me the freedom of long summer holidays, the despotism of my habits of work would have made entire idleness mere ennui. I turned to what, except for stern need, would have been my lifelong work from youth—literature—bored by idleness, wrote my first novel.
The confession in the latter sentence is significant. Poetry all his life was to him an exalted thing, as it was, indeed, to Stoddard and the other poets of beauty. In later years he published many volumes of it and contributed it to the magazines, but never for money. It explains much in his work. No other novelist of the period has so filled his fiction with quoted lyrics and with lyrical prose. It is here that he differs from writers like Ford and Norris: he would produce literature.
His list of work is a varied one. His first long novel and also his last dealt with the Civil War, in which he had served three years as a surgeon. Then, like Dr. Holmes, he wrote pathological studies on which he brought to bear his vast medical knowledge, novels like Dr. North and His Friends and Constance Trescott; he wrote brilliant tales of French life, like The Adventures of François, Dr. Mitchell's favorite among his novels, and A Diplomatic Adventure; he wrote idyllic studies of Nature like When All the Woods Are Green, and Far in the Forest, and, best of all, the historical romances Hugh Wynne, Free Quaker, and The Red City.
These novels more than any others written during the period are products of an exact and extensive knowledge of the materials of which they are woven. We feel at every point that we are in the hands of an expert, the ablest neurologist of his generation, who has seen intimately vast areas of life of which the average reader knows nothing. His analysis of a character has the exactness of a clinic and he adds to it, moreover, an imaginative power that makes us see as well as know and feel. He is skilful in characterization. "Character," he once wrote, "is best delineated by occasional broad touches, without much explanatory comment, without excess of minute description. If I fail to characterize, I fail in novel writing." He has not failed. Octavia Blake in the novel Roland Blake is drawn with peculiar skill; so is Lucretia Hunter in Circumstance, so is Constance Trescott, that study of over-devotion. Always is he best in his studies of femininity, doubtless because women had played so large a part in his medical practice.
With few exceptions his characters are from the higher classes, "gentlefolk," he has called them in his novel Dr. North, and he has made them alive, as Howells was unable to do, and even James. He has discussed the point himself: "Nor can I tell why some men can not create gentlefolk. It is not knowledge, nor is it the being in or of their world that gives this power. Thackeray had it; so had Trollope; Dickens never; nor, in my mind, was George Eliot always happy in this respect; and of the living I shall say nothing."[163] We feel this quality most strongly in his historical novels. He knew intimately his background, Old Philadelphia with its exclusive aristocracy, and he has been able to transport his reader into the very atmosphere of old Second Street, in the days when it contained the most distinctive social set in America. He was a part of it; he wrote as if he were writing his own family history, lovingly, reverently. He was writing romance, but he was writing it as one who is on sacred historical ground where error of fact or of inference is unpardonable. He has himself outlined the work of the historical romancer:
Suppose I have a story to tell and wish to evolve character amid the scenery and events of an historical episode. Suppose, for instance, the story to lie largely in a great city. For years I must study the topography, dress, manners, and family histories; must be able in mind to visit this or that house; know where to call, whom I shall see, the hours of meals, the diet, games, etc. I must know what people say on meeting and parting. Then I must read letters, diaries, and so on, to get the speech forms and to enable me, if it be autobiography, to command the written style of the day. Most men who write thus of another time try to give the effect of actuality by an excessive use of archaic forms. Only enough should be used to keep from time to time some touch of this past, and not so much as to distract incessantly by needless reminders. It is an art, and, like all good art effects, it escapes complete analysis.
Then as to the use of historical characters. These must naturally influence the fate of your puppets; they must never be themselves the most prominent personages of your story.[163]
He presents his material with skill: he is a story-teller; his plots move strongly and always by means not of explanations but of the self-development of his characters. Even his most minor figures form a distinct part of the movement. His style has more of distinction than has any other of the later romancers. He brought to his work the older ideals of literary form and expression, and he wrought not with the haste of the journalist and special correspondent, but with the leisure of the deliberate man of letters. Without question he is as large a figure in his period as Dr. Holmes was in his, and there are those who would rank him as the greater of the two. That he has not been given a more commanding place is due undoubtedly to his great fame as a medical expert. The physician has overshadowed the author.